Works

Installation

Press Release

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce Once Everything Was Much Better Even The Future, a solo exhibition of painting and sculpture by Nir Hod, on view September 11 – October 25, 2014 at 515 West 27th Street, New York. Once Everything Was Much Better Even The Future features his monumental sculptural work of the same name, a snow globe containing a moving scale model of a pumpjack encased in oil and swirling “snow” comprised of gold-colored flakes, a reflection of the immense wealth generated by the oil trade. Hod’s globe encompasses an idealized, isolated landscape of oil extraction in which production and consumption can peacefully coexist. Once Everything Was Much Better Even The Future exemplifies the artist’s practice of pushing the boundaries of juxtaposition, his careful appropriation of historical styles, and imagery querying the fine line between life and death.

Characteristic of Hod’s work is a dark glamour that is both alluring and menacing, exemplified in his three new series of paintings. In I Want Always to be Remembered in Your Heart, smoldering flames are superimposed on delicate flowers, alluding to the paradoxical coexistence of beauty and destruction. Through a chroming process he transforms matte canvases into reflective, mirrored surfaces in the series All We Wish For, Let it Be and The Back Room. In All We Wish For, Let it Be, the artist renders ethereal clouds and shattered glass, alluding to a cycle of destruction and rebirth. The Back Room presents contrasting black and white scratches upon chrome surfaces emanating light. Both works underline the artist’s pursuit of the sublime as a place of pleasurable fear and forbidden desire.

Nir Hod was born in Tel Aviv and currently lives and works in New York. He received his B.F.A. from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. In 2005, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art hosted a mid-career retrospective of the artist’s work. His paintings, sculptures, and videos have been exhibited at institutions worldwide, including The Flag Art Foundation, New York (2013 & 2008); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2009); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2005); Museum of Modern Art, Ostend, Belgium (2001); The Jewish Museum, New York (1998); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1998, 1995, & 1993); and Bass Museum of Art, Miami (1996). Once Everything Was Much Better Even The Future is Hod’s third solo show at Paul Kasmin Gallery, preceded by Genius in 2011 and Mother in 2012.

The exhibition will coincide with James Nares: HIGH SPEED DRAWINGS at Paul Kasmin Gallery’s 293 Tenth Avenue location, on view September 10 – October 25, 2014.